Poor performance of `std::unordered_map`

I’ve recently found out an odd thing. It seems that calculating Collatz sequence lengths with no caching at all is over 2 times faster than using std::unordered_map to cache all elements.

Note I did take hints from question Is gcc std::unordered_map implementation slow? If so - why? and I tried to used that knowledge to make std::unordered_map perform as well as I could (I used g++ 4.6, it did perform better than recent versions of g++, and I tried to specify a sound initial bucket count, I made it exactly equal to the maximum number of elements the map must hold).

In comparision, using std::vector to cache a few elements was almost 17 times faster than no caching at all and almost 40 times faster than using std::unordered_map.

The problematic benchmark is:

#include <iostream>
#include <unordered_map>
#include <cstdint>
#include <ctime>

std::uint_fast16_t getCollatzLength(std::uint_fast64_t val) {
    static std::unordered_map <std::uint_fast64_t, std::uint_fast16_t> cache (1, 2168611);

    if(cache.count(val) == 0) {
        if(val%2 == 0)
            cache[val] = getCollatzLength(val/2) + 1;
        else
            cache[val] = getCollatzLength(3*val+1) + 1;
    }

    return cache[val];
}

int main()
{
    std::clock_t tStart = std::clock();

    std::uint_fast16_t largest = 0;
    for(int i = 1; i <= 999999; ++i) {
        auto cmax = getCollatzLength(i);
        if(cmax > largest)
            largest = cmax;
    }
    std::cout << largest << '\n';

    std::cout << "Time taken: " << (double)(std::clock() - tStart)/CLOCKS_PER_SEC << '\n';
}

It outputs: Time taken: 0.761717

Whereas a benchmark with no caching at all:

#include <iostream>
#include <unordered_map>
#include <cstdint>
#include <ctime>

std::uint_fast16_t getCollatzLength(std::uint_fast64_t val) {
    std::uint_fast16_t length = 1;
    while(val != 1) {
        if(val%2 == 0)
            val /= 2;
        else
            val = 3*val + 1;
        ++length;
    }
    return length;
}

int main()
{
    std::clock_t tStart = std::clock();

    std::uint_fast16_t largest = 0;
    for(int i = 1; i <= 999999; ++i) {
        auto cmax = getCollatzLength(i);
        if(cmax > largest)
            largest = cmax;
    }
    std::cout << largest << '\n';

    std::cout << "Time taken: " << (double)(std::clock() - tStart)/CLOCKS_PER_SEC << '\n';
}

Outputs Time taken: 0.324586